North Jerseyans are beached by all that shore news

A homeless woman stopping to do a little housekeeping on West 34th Street, near Sixth Avenue, in Manhattan on Friday night.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Page 1 of The Record's Sunday edition delivers a shore outlook story like every one I've read or edited in the past 30 years.

Even Staff Writer Christopher Maag was pulled off his Hackensack beat to write a sidebar on how beach communities hit hard by Superstorm Sandy in late 2012 seem different now.

"Drive nearly any street from Sea Bright to Beach Haven," Maag reports, "and you're likely to see streets still ripped apart, houses jacked into the sky, and contractors' dented and oversized pickups that seem to occupy every bare piece of ground." 

Those sound like some jacks. And hundreds of pickups.

More on the shore

There is more shore news in Travel today (T-1).

Feature writer John Petrick recently returned from several years of exile covering trials and suits at the Passaic County Courthouse in Paterson -- and he's rusty, as you can see by the wordy, poorly edited lead paragraph of his piece on working at the shore as a teen.

That one paragraph has a "speeding car," "Garden State Parkway," "steamy Friday afternoon," "every Memorial Day weekend" and "another subsequent summer in my now grown-up life."

I stuck with it, and enjoyed his insider's look at "the endless bore" of a low-paying job running a wheel of chance during the day, which he refers to as "dayside," a newspaper term.

Payback for advertisers

Today's Local news section is from hunger.

In return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue, The Record continues its intense coverage of malls and its neglect of Main Street (B-1).

At Westfield Garden State Plaza, Staff Writer Joan Verdon reports, a new wing has "double-height store facades" to resemble "a downtown street."

Isn't that rich?

And God forbid the editors suggest owners of the Paramus mall spend more money on security after crowds were panicked by gunshots and the fear of gunshots in the past six months.

Boring Kelly is back

A desperate Mike Kelly tries to wring meaning from the dinky Anderson Street Bridge, which was reduced to one lane in each direction from two a couple of years ago because of structural problems (O-1).

The biggest disruption has been experienced by low-wage workers and others who use hundreds of buses that were rerouted, but The Record has never interviewed any of those riders.

I drive over the bridge linking Hackensack and Teaneck a few times a week, and one lane in each direction is enough -- I've never seen a traffic jam there. 

But the stupid headline tries to give readers the impression this is big local news: "Hackensack's bridge going nowhere."

Is it really "Hackensack's bridge"? And it wasn't "going" anywhere before the lane closures.

Look at the shit-eating grin in Kelly's photo. He's pulled another fast one on his editors and readers.

Calling all fat readers

The Better Living cover promises "foodie news" on BL-2.

OK. But with three of the five items devoted to artery clogging ice cream, gelato, chocolate-covered frozen bananas and frozen shakes, this feature should be labeled "fattie news."